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How to Cheat with Cream

It isn't always easy to get hold of good English cream. Canadian food inspectors keep a permanent finger on the trigger ready to shut down imports of dairy products from the UK.

The problem has been frequent outbreaks of foot and mouth disease in the UK. At one point even a product called "Cadbury Dairy Milk" was affected.

So what can you do when you want to make a Victoria Sponge, strawberries and cream, or chocolate eclairs? Well, you can cheat of course. You can make something quite similar to real Devonshire Cream with a little bit of cunning. I did and this is how I did it:

Ingredients

250g cream cheese

1/2 cup of table cream

2 tablespoons sugar

1 dash of lemon juice

Preparation

Using a wooden spoon, mix the cream cheese and sugar together. This step helps to soften the cream cheese.

Add the table cream and lemon juice then whisk for a couple of minutes until the mixture stiffens

Bob's your uncle

John's Notes
You now have a small bowl of delicious white stuff that tastes incredibly like Devonshire cream. So what can you do with it? I put a big dollop of the stuff on top of banana milk jelly (blend 4 over-ripe bananas with some sugar and 2 cups of milk. Add a prepared sachet of gelatin and allow to set).

I also made a Victoria sponge (for convenience I used Greens Sponge Mix). A Victoria sponge cake is a sandwich of two sponges with jam and cream in the middle. I still have a lot of cheat cream left. Watch out for new creamy ideas coming soon to this blog!

Cussons Imperial Leather Soap

This is almost certainly the best known soap in Britain. It's distinctive scent, created in 1768 for a Russian prince, is loved by millions, both in Britain and abroad.

The soap with that very regal scent, originally called "Imperial Russian leather" was created in 1938. During the war years, when soap was rationed, Imperial Leather became very popular because of its reputation for lasting longer than regular soaps.

During the 1950s, Cussons began a TV advertising campaign. It was the appearance of Cussons ads during airing of popular TV shows that led to the popularization of the term "soaps" to describe popular TV dramas.